Come to GDC 2017 and learn how to write better, richer game characters
It's a new year, and that means the 2017 Game Developers Conference is right around the corner. Conference organizers are putting together a top-notch event this year, including an important GDC Narrative Summit talk about writing better games by breaking commonly-used molds of marginalized characters.
Shawn Allen is a longtime game developer currently working on Treachery in Beatdown City, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Breaking Marginalized Character Narrative Molds to Write Better, Richer Characters" he'll speak to his lived experience as a black game designer, writer, and cultural critic.
This is important because Allen will talk about why, in the video game space, there is a yearning to create more black and brown characters, and yet the results are usually mixed, with bad representations being the most common output. He'll also speak about how he approached creating dozens of characters of various ethnic groups in a fictional New York, and how he too has stumbled on his way.